


Jump in joy or sink in sorrow

by nieded



Series: South Downs University [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Good vs Evil, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), M/M, and did i mention, and the grads are in the middle, are having a FIGHT, crying over theses, frustrated swearing, grad school trauma, philosophical discussions on knowledge, south downs university
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27595553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nieded/pseuds/nieded
Summary: In which Crowley and Aziraphale get an unexpected visitor, and the botany grads and history nerds suffer. Also, there’s SCIENCE and a debate about good vs evil, inaction and action, and Remy has her quarterly meltdown.Or:She brushes her pants off, needing something to occupy her hands. “Did that person say there were demons?”Crowley lifts an eyebrow and looks at her through his glasses, a piercing and uncomfortable glare. He smiles, just the hint of teeth which look sharper than usual. “No one will believe you.”“Honestly, the way the last two semesters have gone, I don’t think anyone would be surprised.”
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: South Downs University [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1529294
Comments: 59
Kudos: 297





	Jump in joy or sink in sorrow

Remy has a problem, and it’s not alright. It’s stamped across her forehead in the ever-deepening wrinkle between her eyebrows and the limp attitude of her hair. Grad school looms like a spectre, following her around, jumping out of the corners to shouting out ‘Boo!’ when she’s least expecting it. She’s attending university for her masters in botany, working on her thesis, and her only friends are also suffering through their advanced degrees.

But this is not _the_ problem, nor the problem she wants to address at this moment, nor ever. The real issue here is her tired hand hovering mid-knock over her advisor's office door while she listens in on two poorly hushed, quite shouty voices from the other side.

“You can’t go. It’s a trap! For Satan’s sake, you’re not that big of an idiot.” Ah, that would be Crowley. 

A second voice emerges, lilting yet strained. “We have to give them a chance. They might be telling the truth.”

“Or they might be lying liars who lie planning to dump you in a fiery pit of Hellfire.”

Remy looks down the empty hall to her left, then to her right. What are they talking about even? She knows that second voice. It belongs to the affable if permanently confused Dr Fell. She only knows him by association as Crowley’s immortal husband and one of the history nerd’s professors. She TA’d a seminar class with him last semester, and he still can’t remember her name. He has a prim and particular personality and maintains a level of calmness even in the face of his husband’s shouty lectures on plant nutrition. Remy has never heard him angry.

“I’m not asking for permission, Crowley. I’m going to meet with them regardless. I’m telling you as a courtesy.” 

“Harsh,” Remy says under her breath, pulling a face. Crowley won’t like that.

“What happened to being on our side? We do these things together, angel!”

“I have to give them a chance! Think about it. Our side could be bigger, stronger. There’s a war coming, and we need all the help we can get.” 

She hears Crowley scoff and can picture him kicking the leg of his solid oak desk and then grunting. “It’s a trap.”

“Then if you’re so worried, you can stay home.”

“You know that’s not an option.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want you there.” 

“Fine!” Crowley says. “Great, good. Get sucked upstairs. I don’t care.”

Dr Fell keeps his voice low and calm, a distinct contrast to Crowley’s fuming. “That’s settled then. Good day.”

Following this, there’s a soft _plop!_ sound from inside the office, as though someone had dropped a rather large and spherical frog into the middle of a pond. Then the door swings open.

“ _What?_ ”

Remy’s caught with her ear pressed against the door, frozen in place. “Um,” she says. “Not to intrude but --”

Crowley swings the door open further and flails his hand towards the empty visitor’s chair by the desk. “Too late,” he says and stalks back around to his side of the desk, throwing his body into his wheelie chair with so much force that it backs into the bookcase behind him.

Remy tiptoes into the office and glances around. Dr Fell is nowhere in sight, though she would have sworn he was in the room not a second ago. The small space feels frigid compared to the rest of the building. Most days it’s boiling from Crowley running his small space heater even through the summer, and it smells a bit like an ice cube tray that’s never been washed out in two years, a mix of freezer burn and freon. She sits in the opposite chair but keeps her book bag in her lap.

“I got approval from the ethics committee to start my trials,” she says. The email had come in not twenty minutes ago, and she’d run across campus to get to the Biology building to share the news.

“Great,” Crowley says as he aggressively clicks on his mouse, clicking the little grey squares in Minesweeper at random with a sort of ferocity more suited to a boxing match or perhaps a hot dog eating contest. He looks just as in pain.

“I can get started right away today on the chemical analysis.”

“Wonderful.”

Remy bites her lip and scans the room. She looks at the windowsill decorated with a pothos plant and a spider plant as if Crowley is some struggling young adult in their first flat with the wrong kind of lighting and too much water instead of a botanist with a bonafide PhD. The finicky pale pink orchids are missing. 

She rubs the toes of her Converse together. “Was that Dr Beattie you were talking to?” she asks.

Crowley looks up, sharp and swift, his eyes boring through his sunglasses to look at her. She’s giving him an out, a -- no I didn’t hear you have a very personal row with your husband -- excuse card. He leans back in his chair, chin tilted upwards. “I’ll be sure to let Dr Fell know you think he sounds like a middle-aged woman with an obsession with fungus.” 

She purses her lips in an attempt to hide her smile, catching the slightest uptick of her advisor’s mouth. “A, uh, a nice bouquet always seems to cheer my mum up,” she offers, though she suspects whatever they were arguing about can’t be fixed with some daisies and some wilted forget-me-nots. Were they talking about _war?_

He grunts and throws his feet up onto his desk. “I’ll be sure to send her some, then.” He juts his chin towards the door, an apparent dismissal, and Remy stands up, walking out and back into the hall. She turns to look back only to find the office door has shut itself behind her. 

The thing is, Remy needs help. She needs Crowley to help her determine which of the seven alkaloid compounds of _Atropa belladonna_ she should focus on, and does she have to use the centrifuge in the botany lab? It’s janky and rivals Dr Fell in age. Does she have to document in her methodology and materials that her tools came from the 1800s but no one has replaced them yet because they always seem to work for Crowley?

She’d go to Effie or Sadia, maybe even Andrew, but they’re also deep into their theses, cross-eyed from peering at textbooks and glaring computer screens and into the shared microscopes smeared with pizza-grease from disrespectful first-years. The only person she’s really had a conversation within the last 72 hours was Joe from History who shares her same burgeoning fear of academia.

Remy pulls out her phone and opens Snapchat, the camera catching the reflection of her scowl and double-chin. She lifts the screen and positions her head, spinning around until she can find the best lighting, then hits record. “DRINKS!” she shouts before sending. 

Her phone pings a second later with a notification from Joe. “Madcap? Chips?” 

“See you in 30,” she writes.

  
  


Joe hunches as he sits, shoulders creeping up to his ears. There’s a permanent crease above his eyebrows that hadn’t been there before summer vacation and stubble from several days of hygiene neglect. “Fell is driving me nuts,” he says by way of greeting, passing her a pint.

Remy tips it back, drinking a quarter of it in a go. It’s the cheapest tap available, but she’s going for quantity over quality. “You’re telling me. I heard him and Crowley having a row.” 

“Jesus. Did you know he told me he had a contact at the National Archives I could use for my thesis? And then not three hours later he forgot he even mentioned it to me. Said he had an emergency meeting.”

She grunts and smears her finger through the condensation. “Yeah, I heard. Crowley doesn’t want him to go.”

They sit in silence for a moment, alternating swigs of beer and fistfuls of chips. Joe licks the salt off of his fingers and then wipes them on his pants. His hairline seems thinner than last semester. “What do you think the meeting is about?” 

And what she wants to say is, ‘Hey, it kind of sucks that you’re the only person I have to talk to, and Effie hasn’t had time for me since the start of the semester, and I don’t want to shag you again, but if you would, it’d really help my self-esteem.’ Instead, she says, “Whatever it is, Crowley thinks it’s a trap.”

“And we all know how gullible Dr Fell is.” 

They sit on that for a moment, finishing their drinks. Remy wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and props her head up. “Wanna get us another round?”

“Yeah, all right.”

The start of this semester has been absolute shite between the lack of support from her advisor and the lack of support from her cohort and the awkward silence she gets from her parents on the phone when she vents. Joe doesn’t get the botany (no, _science_ ) thing -- he’s studying the impacts of the Church of England and its long term socio political effects on _marriage_ which everyone knows the Eighth of Henrys gave the entire commonwealth a complex -- but what all of this is about -- the drinking and the obsession with her professor’s love life and her shaking hands is--

“Effie has a boyfriend.” She blurts it out just as Joe sits down with another round of drinks. 

He hovers over his booth seat and furrows his eyebrows before assessing just how much Remy has had to drink so far. “Cool?”

Remy growls, an almost visceral animal-like whine of frustration as she fists her hands. “No. I haven’t seen my best friend in what feels like forever, and all she wants to talk about is Mike. If I have to see another selfie with him on Facebook I may vomit.”

Joe nods along, unphased by the manic look in her eye and the high strained quality note in her voice. “Yup, Sam’s got a new boyfriend and won’t shut up about it.” He shrugs.

“It doesn’t annoy you?”

Joe makes to shrug again but catches the glint in Remy’s eyes and pauses. “Well, sure. The new guy is studying business --” Remy shudders. “-- but Sam’s happy so whatever.”

Remy opens her mouth but stops and stares at her fresh pint before taking a long pull. Effie _is_ happy. This new guy Mike (who she privately still thinks looks like Bill Nye) takes her out every Tuesday night for date night because he knows Thursdays are for Effie’s friends at the Madcap. Despite being an undergraduate, he at least studies botany and not some abomination like Business. He swings around sometimes on his break, and Effie’s whole face lights up. 

“You don’t want to date anyone?” she asks him. 

He pauses midway with a chip to his mouth. “You’re not asking me out, are you?”

“No!”

“Is this because you want to ask… Effie out?”

“No?” 

Joe shoots her a dubious look. “Yeah sure, I’d like to date. Been kinda busy though.” 

“Exaaactly,” she says, though she doesn’t feel relieved.

She leaves the Madcap and the whole endeavour with Joe only a little bit tipsy with no further questions answered about, well... Anything. Her body feels a bit like it swallowed uranium along with her beer, a massive and melting feeling. She goes home and faceplants in her pillow. She’s out before she even switches off her lamp.

  
  


Remy comes back from summer break the same as ever, her mousy brown hair down to her shoulders which she pulls back into a loose pony, wearing her flannel shirt even during the hottest peak of autumn. It’s like she blinked at the end of the spring semester and found herself back at university, swapping her sandals for Carhartts and her purse for a backpack. She spent the summer with her little brother -- not so little anymore, almost full-grown -- and their dog Stanley, walking between coffee shops and comic stores, and down to the Thames and back. And when he went off to go skate with his friends and play videogames, she went out into the garden to watch her mom dig her hands in the soil and turn it over, plucking weeds and trimming leaves, and smearing dirt on her cheek whenever she went to tuck her hair back. Remy loves plants and nature; she loves biology, but she has always lived her life more in theory than in action. 

The others come back different. Sadia steps light on her feet and waves her phone in all of their faces as she shows them pictures of the road trip she took with Andrew. Remy saw the entire saga on Facebook, but it’s different to hear in person, the exhilaration one might feel standing on the beaches in Brighton barefoot at the end of the ocean. Andrew sports a tan several shades darker, the kind of dark that only comes from being burnt red as a blister until the skin peels and then it’s impossible to get burnt again. Sadia commandeers the little corner Andrew was banished to last year and moves her things over to the desk next to him, and they spend the morning with their heads together looking at her phone together. 

Effie plops down next to Remy where they share two desks pushed up against each other and shares a picture she took last weekend as a last hurrah before the start of third semester. She stands next to Mike, the young Bill Nye look-alike, who is handsome in a nerdy kind of way, in front of the Old Vic holding hands. “We went to the theatre! He’s never really been into it much, but he goes with me, and he’s been teaching me all about the project car he’s working on.” Then she wiggles her fingers and shows off the grease still stuck under fingernails despite soap and water, copious amounts of orange goop, and a nail file. He owns a little mid-90s VW Golf that sputters when it starts and won’t shift into third gear, and isn’t it amazing he has _a car on campus?_

Yeah, it’s great, Remy says, and then Effie’s phone beeps and she spends the next ten minutes texting with her boyfriend who is in a class at that moment just one floor below their office. 

Sometimes, Remy feels a little bit like an alien. She’s an imposter standing in this graduate room next to three other individuals who came here to become masters of science, who are studying cures for global warming, the intelligence of underground mycelium networks, and conservation efforts in the Arctic Circle. She inhabits a small, thin yet soft and squishy body which floats her from floor to floor. The only times she feels grounded, really here, is when she’s sitting in the decontam lab with a dropper in one hand and poison in the other. All the other times she’s just rounding out the numbers in her grad class.

Someone knocks on the grad room door. They all look up. “Remy,” Crowley says in his snakeskin boots, hair grown a bit long over the summer. He is no less strange or gaunt-looking, still all sharp angles and sprawling limbs. His face is fifty-percent sunglasses. “You’re late for our TA meeting.” 

“Right,” she says and scrambles for her things.

  
  


Three weeks into their third semester, Andrew’s face takes on a sullen, red-eyed look, nose pressed against the screen of his laptop. He vacillates between stuttering anxiety-induced sobriety and getting so high he can barely lift his head. Sadia moves her chair even closer to him as if to barricade themselves from the onslaught of responsibilities but even the pink oozing edges of their new romance dim in the face of their research demands. Their course load has been cut in half so they can devote their time to their research studies, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have exams and essays and undergraduate courses to TA. 

If the small, mildewed grad room feels tense, it’s nothing compared to Crowley’s Intro lectures for which Remy is still a TA. She remembers her very first impression of her advisor -- chaotic, manic, on the border of trying too hard to be cool -- and doesn’t recognise this new person, tense and snappish. He blitzes through the powerpoints, cuts off questions, and stands behind the front table, stiff and disinterested. Gone is his lackadaisical demeanour, the pacing -- no prowling -- around the lecture hall. Gone is the shouting about how soil nutrition affects a plant’s ability to photosynthesise sunlight. 

“Have you noticed anything weird about Crowley?” she asks one day.

Effie tucks an errant curl of hair behind one ear. “No,” she says without looking up. 

Remy frowns. She has a headache from the smell of Effie’s highlighters as she presses into every line of her copy of _Seaweed Sustainability_. “Why are you highlighting every single line?”

“Because it’s all important,” Effie says, her face pinched. She glides her highlighter over the page like a person possessed, a sort of ferocity Remy has only seen when her brother’s about tackle an opponent in rugby or on her father’s face when the news pundits start talking about Parliament. 

“Yeah, but,” Remy says because these days her brain is slow and tired. “Doesn’t it defeat the purpose if you highlight everything?”

“It’s all important!” Effie shouts before closing her textbook with a snap. The book itself probably only weighs less than two pounds, so it doesn’t have the dramatic look she intended. Still, the exhausted bruises under eyes speak volumes.

“Are you okay?”

“Are _any of us_ okay?” 

Remy concedes the point. 

She texts Joe about it too. “Have you noticed anything weird about Dr Fell? Because Crowley seems sad. :( :( :(“

“Yeah,” he responds. “Asked him to go through my sources. Said Dr Hexton from Oxford is an unreliable source and gave me a 10 min speech on the unsavoury things he did in the late 1800s.”

“Okay???”

“He was like half my sources!”

Knowing as little about Dr Fell as Dr Fell knows about her, Remy decides this seems par for the course. So. She closes her eyes and leans back in her desk chair, inhaling the dusty aroma of their little grad office, the lingering smell of Andrew’s BO mingling with the algae sample Effie’s left on her desk for the last three days ‘for monitoring.’ She needs a distraction from the tension around her.

“Fine,” she mutters to herself. “I’ll go work on my thesis.”

  
  


Remy gets her sterilised tray and pair of nitrile gloves. Then she takes a sheet of muslin and tears it into strips, laying each piece out beside a pair of delicate, tiny herb shears. The only thing left is the actual belladonna plant so she can start the first step of the drying phase before she can extract its alkaloids. The plant itself is kept in a locked, temperature-controlled enclosure with netting surrounding it and a big sign that reads DO NOT TOUCH to prevent wayward undergraduates from poisoning themselves. Every inch of the plant is toxic, deadly if ingested and itching and oozing at best if touched. She’s halfway through entering the code on the padlock when she hears a familiar frantic voice in the hall. 

“Ah, uh, no. No no no. Uh, you can’t stay. It’s too dangerous for you. There are demons everywhere.”

Crowley? Remy tilts her head as though her ears could somehow zoom in on the conversation despite evolution and also possible hearing loss from blaring Tegan and Sara in her headphones during a rather angst-ridden dramatic year when she was fourteen while sobbing in hysterics into her pillow -- you know, teenager stuff. She catches a second voice, somewhat monotonous and indistinct. 

“Demons?” they say. “I insist I stay.”

“No, no. There are too many of them. They’ll overwhelm you. They’re called -- ah -- first years, and they don’t even listen to me.”

“Of course not. You’re a traitor.” 

Remy’s eyebrows shoot up and she mouths, “ _What?”_ under her breath. She abandons her belladonna plant and scoots closer to the door, left open a fraction of an inch, ducking below the window where they won’t see her.

“I’m a bloody hero. Thank you very much.” Crowley snaps. “Look, just go to the house and wait there. Do not touch anything, especially the TV.”

“The garden seems nice at… this time of year? Is that what humans say?”

Crowley snarls. “Do. Not. Touch the Garden.”

“Ah yes, Aziraphale did mention you were working out your issues with Eden.”

Crowley sputters with such ferocity Remy can hear the spit. “I’m sorry, what?”

“He said your garden was a metaphor,” the monotonous voice says.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. You need to leave. I have a student coming.”

“Is it a first-year?” the voice says, curious.

“Worse. It’s a grad student. Remy!” Crowley shouts. 

She startles and peers around the door, waggling her fingers, crouched like Elmer Fudd while hunting for wabbits. “Uh, yeah?” She looks at the person Crowley has been talking to, a rather pale person of indeterminate gender with the lightest, fluffiest hair to rival Effie’s sprouting from their head in little tufts. They could be a love child of Tilda Swinton and Timothée Chalamet if Swinton and Chalamet locked their child in the basement with a singular UV bulb to produce just enough vitamin D to vibe the ‘questionably vampire’ look. 

“Go,” Crowley snaps. The monotonous person motions upwards with their hand as if tugging on a lamp string, but Crowley stops them with a tight grip on their forearm. “Not like _that_. Use the _door_.” He points at the building’s exit leading out to the common grounds. 

“How fascinating,” the person says. They begin to leave but stop just beside Remy, leaning in and smelling her with one big inhale before frowning. “I see,” they say before exiting.

Remy -- crouched on the floor where her knees and butt are going numb -- looks up to find her ornery advisor looming over her. His mouth presses into a tight thin line which would be terrifying if it also didn’t make him look a bit like a frog. “Uh, heyyyy Crowley,” she says. She wiggles her fingers again.

He draws a slow breath before exhaling, the force of which collapses his shoulders. He then extends a hand toward her while opening the door to give her room to step out into the hall. 

She brushes her pants off, needing something to occupy her hands. “Did that person say there were demons?”

Crowley lifts an eyebrow and looks at her through his glasses, a piercing and uncomfortable glare. He smiles, just the hint of teeth which look sharper than usual. “No one will believe you.”

“Honestly, the way the last two semesters have gone, I don’t think anyone would be surprised.” 

There’s a beat of silence before he huffs, surprised, a little laugh escaping without permission. Then he relaxes, shifting his shoulders and the cant of hips into something a bit more familiar and comfortable. He smiles a real smile, closed-lipped and fond. “Thesis, Remy,” he reminds her, pointing inside the lab.

She groans. “But--”

“No buts. Go.” 

She turns around with a scowl which looks more disappointed than she feels. “I’m telling everyone!” she says over her shoulder. 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as you finish your results by the end of the semester, I don’t care.” 

  
  


But the thing is, nobody _cares_ that Crowley said demons. Remy plops herself back at the lab table and opens their group chat between the botany grads and the history nerds. 

> crowley says there are demons!
> 
> **Hannah** : and?
> 
> **Effie** : Crowley also says the dinosaurs didn’t exist, so
> 
> **Andrew** : cRowleY sAys thERE arE DeMonS
> 
> **Joe** : dr fell is gonna fail me

Joe includes several sad emojis, a dead emoji, and a thrilling narrative sequence involving a speeding train, an explosion, and a man. 

> yeah cos hes freaking  
>  out about demons!
> 
> **Joe** : well maybe he could  
>  maybe not take it out  
>  on me?

Which, okay, he’s not wrong. Everyone is on edge this semester. They are almost three quarters into their master’s degrees, conducting the most crucial part of their research. Everyone is tense. Everyone is exhausted. And it’s all been made worse by Crowley and Dr Fell’s despondent attitude. For the last two semesters, the only highlight of her week is watching Crowley terrorise the first-years with his antics, and by the second semester, it was like she was in on his joke. She knows him well enough now to see the smallest smirk or the peak of curiosity in a raised eyebrow, and all of that has been missing this year. 

She takes a slow breath before beginning to put away each of her materials, the sterilised tray, the muslin, her delicate herb shears, tossing her nitrile gloves in the bin before returning to her phone. She taps out a quick message.

> intervention???

It doesn’t take much to convince them to ditch their projects and convene at the Madcap. Within an hour, they all appear and cram themselves in their booth. It’s only five, but they know how it gets on Thursdays, so they stake their claim on what promises to be a long and drunken night. “We have to stop meeting like this,” Sam says, dropping his head on the table. He lifts it immediately when his cheek touches something sticky. Besides, he doesn’t mean it. He already has his tablet out and has created a new Google Shared Drive and a spreadsheet labelled OPERATION INEFFABLE.

Sadia frowns before throwing back her cosmo. She peers over his shoulder and receives a scandalous look when she burps in his ear. “What does ineffable mean?”

“I dunno, it’s just something Dr Fell always says. It’s like a bad joke. Why did the chicken cross the road? I don’t know. It’s ineffable.”

Joe snorts into his beer. 

Remy breathes a sigh of relief, the urge to drink and wash out the semester recedes for a moment. It all starts to feel a bit normal again, them coming together to conspire over the going-ons of their professors.

Remy tries to apprise them of what she knows -- which would have been a lot easier if people had been listening from the beginning and also if she hadn’t already consumed two shots of rail whiskey -- but it comes out muddled and slurred. “Crowley said demons! And also I heard him and Dr Fell get into an argument. Something about a war? Enemies?”

“Whatever it is, it’s making my life miserable,” Joe says. “Dr Fell is so strange.”

“ _Stranger_ ,” Sam interjects. “Can’t finish a subject, goes on long tangents about the 14th century--”

“--on the verge of tears any minute, like he’s just going to explode,” Hannah adds. “Whatever is happening between those two, it’s not pretty.”

Remy tries to picture it and finds it believable. Dr Fell is on the verge of tears any minute anyway, whether he’s cooing over that day’s choice of cut flower for his boutonniere as Crowley pins it to his vest or absorbed nose-down in a dusty book. Last semester, Effie used to snap Remy pictures through Crowley’s office window while the two ate lunch with a heart filter and rainbow font reading, “RELATIONSHIP GOALS.” Now Effie doesn’t snap her at all. 

They compile a short and vague list of THINGS THEY KNOW. 

ONE (1): 

Crowley and Dr Fell are having a row which may or may not involve teleporting angrily from each others’ offices. 

(Sadia shrugs. “Doesn’t have the same effect as a good door slam.” 

“But could you imagine Dr Fell slamming a door?” Hannah gasps.

Sam nods, “It’s much gayer this way.”) 

TWO (2): 

There is a visitor of indeterminate everything staying with Crowley and Dr Fell. All three of the history nerds have seen the Visitor hovering about Dr Fell’s office. Sometimes they’re sitting in the big, overstuffed chair in his office, ramrod straight, knees bent at perfect 90-degree angles or worse, standing directly behind Dr Fell’s chair. 

“Fell always looks…” Sam stops to ponder. “Nervous?”

“Annoyed?” Joe suggests. “Bothered?”

“Miffed? Downright pissed off?” Hannah continues. Dr Fell would be so proud of their use of a thesaurus. “And they ask really weird questions all the time--”

“--and weirder still, Dr Fell sometimes can’t answer them,” Sam finishes. (Simple things, like what an iPad is. “Oh dear, I don’t bother with those things. I’m not sure what an Apple or an I-PAD is. I mean, I know what an _apple_ is obviously--ha ha--but that gizmo with the screen and the-the inter-net--” You could hear the hyphen, “--are not my area. You’d have to ask Crowley.”)

Remy privately thinks the nerds have all been spending way too much time together in their little History grad office if they’re finishing each other’s sentences. Their shared space is smaller and less mildewy but dustier and located across the hall from Dr Fell’s office and all of his books, making it a fire hazard. Remy would take the Botany grad room any day. It’s fine. It’s not like the botany grads are nerdy enough to finish each other’s sentences. They’re busy. With their studies. And their dating. Right. 

Hannah proceeds to recount the time the Visitor was in Dr Fell’s office while Dr Fell was on the phone hunched over his desk with one hand flipping and shutting his little pocket watch over and over again. The Visitor had watched him the entire time without blinking while Hannah had pushed her chair just in front of the door to snoop from across the hall. “I _can’t_ send him to the cottage, Crowley. He sits there and just watches the blasted telly. Hours of the HGTV! Hours of that whatsit, the… Yes! The Bachelorette! If he keeps that up, he truly will sound the horn for another armageddon.” He paused and glanced over at the Visitor, one ear cocked intent on Crowley’s words. Meanwhile, Hannah mouthed to herself, _another_ armageddon? He dropped his voice. “We can’t put the _parental lock_ on the TV--OH. Oh, I see.” He sighed. “Fine, can you just take him for the day?”

Hannah heard Crowley through the phone across the hall and two cracked doors shout, “I’m not a bloody babysitter, angel!” but not a minute later Dr Fell escorted the Visitor out of his office with directions to the Botany building. 

THREE (3): 

“Demons!” Remy shouts. 

Sam, who is at this point down three beers and a shot of tequila, jabs a finger within a three-foot radius of her vicinity as a nearby Sadia bats his hand out of her face. “Hyperbole!” 

“He’s got the snake eyes!” 

“Riiight, to go along with his face tattoo.” 

“And there’s a war coming!” 

“HY. PER. BO. LE.” 

In the corner, Effie has sandwiched herself between Andrew’s backpack and Remy’s shoulder fast asleep. Andrew has his head thrown back with a hand over his face while Sadia pats his knee in sympathy. Remy is losing this argument.

They call a draw on this one, as much as seven very drunk mid-to-late twenty-somethings can while stumbling out of the Madcap and onto High Street. It’s already mid-October, and a sharp gust of wind whooshes past, the cold, harsh, crispness waking them up enough to stumble on home. 

Thus begins OPERATION INEFFABLE in earnest which involves them snooping around their respective professors’ offices to determine more about the Visitor. Are they a friend? A foe? Why does Crowley dislike them so much? 

“I think they’re a bigoted relative who disapproves of his relationship with Crowley,” Sam posits. 

“I think they’re an ex,” Andrew says.

Remy takes a moment to puzzle through it and tries to imagine Dr Fell _dating_ , but she imagines her perspective is skewed. Most of her dating experiences were awkward, anxiety-inducing, and one time memorably involved a goat knocking her to the ground. Still, it’s hard to believe there would be more than one person in this world -- or galaxy? Space-time continuum? -- who would be attracted to Dr Fell. Ever since finding out they were husbands, she’s wondered how they met or even fell in love, and the only response her brain ever gives is, “I don’t get it.”

The botany grads have minimal contact with the Visitor. After the day Remy caught them in the hall, they’ve kept a wide berth around Crowley’s territory. Instead, the botany grads rely on ill-gotten photos taken from under desks and behind textbooks from the history nerds and then have to listen to Hannah bemoan about the Visitor’s fashion choices. “Spats!” she shouts. “He wears spats! He’s more behind in the times than Dr Fell!”

And Joe, who sometimes has in his young life made the rare connection between two dots, says, “So does that mean there are more of them, that Dr Fell and Crowley aren’t an anomaly?” They all take a moment to let that sink in before he ruins his brilliant thought with, “They’re aliens! Or clones! I knew it!”

Not only does the Visitor dress anachronistically, but they also appear, disappear, and reappear in the oddest of places around the Humanities building. He spends whole days of the week standing behind Dr Fell in his office while trying to conduct office hours and department meetings, just staring, just standing. Fell loses a bit of his affableness and starts sounding short and snappish, his shoulders hunching to his ears in frustration, but it’s worse when the Visitor isn’t around because Dr Fell spends all day calling Crowley, clutching the phone handle so tight it might break. “Have you heard anything? What are they up to? Well, recheck your mobile. Did you check the news just in case…?”

They also find out the Visitor has a name, Zaniel. But as a collective, they decide they don’t like them, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to know the enemy’s name. They don’t sympathise with homewreckers after all. 

Despite only seeing Crowley interact with the Visitor one time, they all know exactly how he feels about them. 

Remy’s in the lab with her very official lab coat and her nitrile gloves and a pair of shears, cutting little leaves off of her belladonna plant when a _ping!_ from a phone goes off nearby and startles her. She scrambles to catch the shears she dropped. “Oh no, that’s not good,” Effie says.

“What’s not good?”

“Dr Fell’s boutonniere today.” She leaves her station, carefully separated from Remy so their two experiments don’t interact, and waves the definitely not-sterile but also very important phone in her face. 

Per Effie’s request, Joe has been sneaking pictures of Dr Fell from lecture so they can examine the flowers Crowley picks for him every day. They squint and lean closer to get a better look. “Is that a mint sprig?” Effie asks. “And maybe…” They zoom in. Joe isn’t exactly a master photographer, nor would he do well in the paparazzi business. “...Apple thorn?”

Remy’s already flipping through her lecture notes and skims through until she finds what she’s looking for. “Oh, yeah, that’s not good. _Suspicion_ and… _disguise._ ”

“So, Crowley is suspicious the Visitor is in disguise?”

“Here under pretences?”

“Not all that they seem?”

They take notes over two weeks with the due diligence of two grad students who have learned how to collect and organize data for science but are instead applying it to something -- anything -- that doesn’t involve having to research. Crowley’s choices include yellow carnations, rhododendron, and even a cutting of aloe which continue to express his disdain, but as the week advances the messaging changes too. Vervain and valerian. White heather and blue hyacinth. 

“So in conclusion,” Sam says the next time they meet at the Madcap. He has his laptop out and a PowerPoint open with all the evidence they’ve collected. “The Visitor initially was met with resistance and deep suspicion by Dr Crowley--”

“ _Just Crowley_ ,” the botany grads interject.

“--which led to a rift between him and Dr Fell. I believe we can interpret new developments to signify that he continues to be mistrustful of the Visitor but is now tolerating Dr Fell’s association with them. Contrary to this, whence Dr Fell seemed nervous and anxious about the presence of the Visitor, he is now more annoyed and irritated.” 

“So, we don’t like the Visitor?” Andrew asks.

“No, we don’t like the Visitor.”

“Aye, aye!” Sadia says.

  
  


And it’s going well. It’s going great, even. Having the Visitor to focus on gives them all a sort of purpose and distraction from the craziness of the semester, and if it means Andrew and Sadia stop giggling in the corner for one moment and Effie shows up to the Madcap instead of bailing on them to see Bill Nye, then great. Good. Things feel normal. 

She mentions it to Joe early November in the library where they’ve commandeered a table and hid a sleeve of hobnobs under Remy’s grading assignments.

Joe frowns. “I mean, what’s the big deal?”

Remy looks up and shakes her fringe from her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Like, okay, I used to think you were jealous.” 

“What?”

“Yeah, like, um…” He pauses and thinks over his words. “I thought maybe you were interested in Effie and were jealous.” 

Remy makes a face. “Um, no?”

“But then you keep talking about Andrew and Sadia too. So. What’s your deal?”

“I don’t have a deal,” she says, defensive. She bats at a lock of hair in front of her face and huffs. 

Joe keeps pressing. “But you don’t seem to be happy for them that they’re happy.”

“I am happy for them. I just -- I just don’t get _why_ they’re happy.” She pauses and ignores the look of utter confusion on Joe’s face. “Huh, I guess I didn’t know that until just now.” They sit for a moment while she chews the inside of her cheek.

“Dating doesn’t interest you?”

Remy opens her mouth and shuts it again. Then she lets out a sigh. She means for it to sound exasperated but instead, she just sounds tired. “I mean, sure, in a theoretical kind of way.” Dating in practice has never really gone well for her. She never knows what to say or where to put her hands or when the swelling violins are going to play. The romantic orchestra in the background is always on mute. When she sat across from her ex over dinner, she heard crickets. 

“What do you want then?”

She shrugs. “Dunno.” Then she looks down at her lap, the dangling ends of her hair hanging in front of her face. “I’d like to shave my head.”

Joe frowns and then rubs the top of his scalp where the hair has thinned even more over the summer from either poor genetics or dealing with an immortal professor stuck in the late 1800s with precisely the same number of idiosyncrasies as an angel with a penchant for sin. “What if you find out your head is weird-shaped?” 

“Well, we can already tell yours is so what do you have to lose?”

“Hey!” he scowls and grabs his abandoned bike helmet, shoving it on top of his head.

“Yep, that definitely makes it better.”

He sniffs and reaches for the packet of hobnobs before opening his laptop, shutting her out from view. Discussion ended, Remy huffs. Fine, good. It’s easier not to think about shaving her head or why she just doesn’t function in romantic relationships like normal people. She returns to grading a lab report with a big red sharpie and draws a frowny face on the top of a first-year’s lab book. Honestly, why do they bother turning them in if they aren’t even going to take notes?

This sort of stuff never bothers Crowley. Every time she mentions it to him, he shrugs as much as one can while slouched so low in his office chair that his backside hangs off the seat. “Great, isn’t it? All this free will and this is what they choose to do with it.” 

Choices, he always talks about choices. You can choose to show up for lecture or not. You can choose to take notes or sleep through the whole semester. It infuriates her to no end. Not completing her work gives her suffocating anxiety, and she doesn’t get how someone can just choose not to do it.

“Some people need to learn by doing -- or not doing in this case. Everything has an aftermath. Even inaction is an action that leads to consequences.” He says this offhandedly while simultaneously flipping through lab books and clicking through a game of Minesweeper at random.

Remy has a hard time reconciling the walking disaster she met the first semester with the same wise professor who spouts unexpected nuggets of wisdom at random. He’s chaos and the voice that never shuts up in her head. She stares at the next lab book, this one fortunately completed, and wonders what the result of her inaction would be.

She pushes the top of Joe’s laptop down until it shuts, and he shoots her a look. “I’m gonna do it. I’m going to shave my head.”

“Okay? Yay?”

“Wanna do it with me?”

And Joe -- marvellous, steadfast Joe with his yellow bicycle helmet still crooked on his head -- shrugs and says, “Yeah, all right,” with as much conviction as he agrees to anything.

  
  


It’s challenging to maintain a high level of suspicion about the Visitor and precarious nature of their professors’ relationship status when grad school demands every moment of their waking hours (and even some nightmares). Sadia takes to leaving eye drops on her desk so she can use them after all-nighters, and Remy’s ratio of coffee to water morphs from 1:7 to 5:3. The spotty first and second-years working the cafeteria know her quadruple espresso order by heart and have it ready by the time she gets to the cashier. She’d say thank you if she wasn’t on the verge of becoming a zombie.

With three weeks until the end of the semester, she has to write her results which would be easy if she had _any_ results. She wakes up at three in the morning, unable to sleep, and goes over her calendar in her head. It’s Friday, and she has a backlog of labs to grade and upload to the server, a lecture to attend, a seminar to TA, and a practice ‘peer review’ of a research article to complete for Dr Saxe all by the end of the day. She doesn’t have enough time, and the little time she has she spends gripped in immobilising anxiety about how little time she has. She’d laugh at the irony except laughing to oneself in the dark witching hours of the early morning may be a sign of insanity, so she bites her tongue instead.

Remy throws the covers off and stumbles bleary-eyed into the bathroom. She takes one look at the bruises under eyes and her drooping hair, the promise of hacking it off on her to-do list if only she can just get through everything else, and ties it back into a messy bun. On other girls it’d look chic, but on her it screams _I don’t know when I last showered, and I don’t care_. She throws a hoodie on and a pair of jeans worn three days in a row. The cafeteria hasn’t opened yet, so she stops at the chemist for a Red Bull and staggers over to the lab.

Several days ago she had cut several sprigs from _Atropa belladonna_ and tied them together with muslin, then hung them up with clothespins in the back of decontam where they could air dry. Every day she stopped in to check on them, waiting until the leaves were brittle and dry. At four in the morning, she unlocks the lab and blinks at the harshness of the lights before fumbling for nitrile gloves. When she touches the leaves, they crackle and crumble. 

She pulls the sprigs down and lays them on the table, breaking off pieces to grind down into a fine powder. With her mortar and pestle, she feels a bit witchy, though she may be the first witch in history to wear a lab coat and a respirator with goggles. There’s a fine line between magic and medicine, between mystery and science, and it feels like a spell as she simmers the ground up leaves in the acidic bath. 

The goal is to separate the alkaloids, something she has practised half a dozen times before. She has her funnel and her petri dish ready to go, and just as she goes to pour the mixture through the filter, she notices something off about it. The whole thing has clumped together instead of separated. She filters it and examines the remaining liquid solvent which should have the dissolved alkaloid salts, but when she grabs her eyedropper and her microscope, she can’t see anything on the slide except for the acidic solution. 

“No, no no.” Her hands shake as she grabs another sample. She can’t evaporate the liquid down to its alkaloid parts if there aren’t any salts to begin with. “Shit, shit, shit,” she curses as she throws the slide to the side. She buries her head in her hands.

It didn’t work. She recounts her steps. Cut the leaves. Dry the leaves and grind them into a powder. Add the acidic bath, and the salts will separate from the rest of the plant matter. She’s done this before. She’s never failed before.

The feeling rising within her is a bubbling pressure, cloying and thick in her throat. It bursts out of her in the form of hot tears and frustration, three semesters worth of sleep deprivation, caffeine, and three AM loneliness all boiling down to a failed experiment. She would start over except there’s no way she could complete the whole process again and still have time to draft her results by the end of the semester, and Remy doesn’t even know what she did wrong in the first place.

She takes the remaining sludge of plant matter and dumps it in a petri dish, slapping the cover on top. Then she gathers the rest of her materials and shoves her tray on the back counter. She wraps the whole thing in cling wrap, DO NOT TOUCH written in Sharpie.

 _Think_. What should she do? What would _Crowley_ do? 

Crowley can do anything. Crowley can teleport in and out of rooms and read her mind and see right through her. He can look at her and just _know_ , just like he’d know what to do right now. 

She doesn’t gasp or sigh in relief but chokes down the panicked sobs coming out of her. She grabs her phone and checks the time, just ten minutes before seven on a Friday morning, and it’s serendipitous -- ineffable even -- that it’s only ten minutes before his office hours. Chucking her respirator and goggles into the bin for decontamination, she rips off her gloves and slides out into the hall. 

Her shoes slap against the tile, and the automated lights flicker to life as she runs down the empty corridor and up the stairwell to the third floor. She’s out of breath when she skids in front of his office door and has to hold onto the frame to catch her breath.

She lifts her hand to knock but stops when she hears voices. Throwing her head back, she lets out a groan of frustration. It’s seven AM. Who would take Crowley up on his offer of office hours on a Friday morning? But then she recognises that voice, one she’s only heard once before, flat and monotonous, a mix of condescending and pity. The sweat on her back chills.

She doesn’t mean to pry but… but well, sometimes it’s easier to look in on someone else than to look in on herself, so she peers through the tiny, slivered window pane and finds Crowley on the side of his desk, leant back with his ankles crossed and his arms folded over his chest. The Visitor stands in front of one of the chairs with a sneering expression.

“I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why Aziraphale would stay. You, I understand. I’ve heard your type feed off of these things.”

Crowley doesn’t move. His glasses are on, and he chucks his chin to his chest. It’s hard to see where he’s looking. She’s never seen him look so… so… defeated before. But maybe that’s not the right word. He seems disappointed as though he was just proven right when he had hoped for something better. His voice is rough, low. Tired. “What things?” he asks.

“The stress and corruption and anger. All I’ve seen are humans who are unhappy, who cheat to get ahead, who argue, all over the world, especially here at this--” They stumble for the right word, “--university, a place of _knowledge_. I saw six different humans cry yesterday. It must be a feast for you.”

Remy glowers at this and wipes at her face, still wet from her own bout of frustration and tears. She sucks in a hiccuping breath and leans her ear closer to the gap in the door. 

Crowley pauses for a long time, picking at some invisible thread on his otherwise pristine jacket. “I tolerate you being here for Aziraphale,” he says, a tightness in his voice. “The deal was you could stay without being harmed as our guest so long as you were _gracious_ and you weren’t here to convince him to return to the Host.”

“I have not asked him to come back--”

“I am a _demon_ , and I know the rules of a deal,” he snaps. “You said you wanted to come and understand why he stayed, why he fought so hard for this place. Yet, all you’ve done is challenge and scoff at everything he’s shown you. You tear down every lesson he’s given you, and I’ve had about enough. All you angels do are look for the sin. You flip over rocks hoping to find a temptation you can bloody smite so much that you can’t see the _good_ in front of you.” 

The Visitor scoffs. “Good? What good? I haven’t seen anything to convince me otherwise that we shouldn’t call for Armageddon.” 

Remy, who just spent the last thirty minutes in a panic over her thesis and the probable possibility she will fail out of grad school and maybe die forever, inhales a sharp, faltering breath. But her dog! Her little brother! The hours she spends on Buzzfeed quizzes and laughing at memes!

Then Crowley lights up, snapping his fingers. He reaches behind, twisting his spine in a way that suggests too many or too few vertebrae before grabbing his monitor and yanking it out of the socket. He shoves it in the Visitor’s face -- still illuminated -- so they have no choices but to hold it. “Like this, the internet! Phenomenal cosmic powers; itty bitty storage space!”

“It’s pornography,” the Visitor says, monotonous and in direct contrast to Crowley’s spiritedness. They go to drop the monitor before getting interrupted.

“It’s not _just_ pornography.” He jabs at his keyboard and then swivels the screen towards the Visitor to show him the Wikipedia webpage. “Look at this! Free information! Anyone can read it!”

“But isn’t anyone allowed to edit it? It seems like a demonic trap for disinformation and lies.”

“Ehh,” Crowley says, “sure, maybe that’s what it was intended for, but look what the humans did! They have a team of fact-checkers who constantly monitor new submission and edits, and the whole thing is crowdsourced by donations to keep it free and away from corporate influence. Free accessible knowledge! How many centuries did it take for your people to make the Word of G-- _Her_ accessible to anyone? Five-and-a-half _thousand_ years?” 

Remy has never heard Crowley like this before. Sure, he shouts a lot. She’s always held the slightest opinion that he yells in lecture to keep the first-years from falling asleep. She’s never witnessed this though, this fervent arguing almost propelling him onto his desk like some emotional Oscar-worthy scene from Dead Poets Society. “What good would Her creation be if they were all stuck in the Garden? Nothing to test them? Nothing to drive them to be better and to be good?” He gets in The Visitor’s face, and she can almost hear the hiss of spittle when he talks. “You can’t be good if you can’t also be bad, if there’s no litmus test.”

“Knowledge teaches them to be bad just as much as being good, maybe more so.”

“Knowledge doesn’t make anyone good, bad, right, wrong, upside down, or inside out. Knowledge makes them passionate, and it’s what they do with it that passion that makes them good or bad. The world hasn’t collapsed yet, has it, despite Heaven and Hell’s best efforts, and why is that? Hmm? In fact, it gets better every minute. I know you think I have issues about my past, but I would take this here, right now, over everything else I’ve lived through, even Heaven.” The Visitor makes a disgruntled, ferocious sound but Crowley cuts them off. “Humans evolve,” he says, pointing out the window at the world. “Angels do not.” 

“They destroy.”

“And create. Two steps forward, one step back is still one step forward.” 

And then when the Visitor looks about to argue, Crowley does the most unexpected and frightening thing Remy could ever expect. He looks out the little window of his office door right at her. She swallows hard, caught out. It’s a different sort of stare, not one of encouragement or amusement. It’s filled with fire. He takes two strides before he yanks the office door open to the hall where she has been spying and grabs her by the arm, dragging her inside before she can turn and make her escape. He twists her around so she’s facing The Visitor, wide-eyed. “This is what I mean. Look at her!”

The Visitor stares at her for a moment, and she stares back. She holds her breath, on the verge of even more tears. “She’s crying. That’s the seventh human I’ve seen cry now in 24 hours.”

“Wha--no.” Crowley jerks her around and stares at her puffy face just as she sniffles. “Why are you crying?”

Her face crumples. _Jesus_ , she thinks, mortified. She can’t start bawling in front of her advisor who is having an existential argument with what might be an alien or--as she is beginning to suspect more and more by the direction of their debate-- _an actual angel_. But it turns out she can and does, a big heavy sob escaping her as she stutters out that she utterly destroyed her experiment and is now going to fail out of grad school, and really, honestly, swear-to-god lose the best thing in her life she’s ever done. 

“I-I-I ruined the whole experiment. I don’t know what happened,” she hiccups. “The alcohol solution disintegrated and--and I have no by-product left to analyse. You mind as well just fail me now.”

“What? No,” Crowley sputters. He twists his face into an expression of confusion and maybe even a little fear. Remy must be the first grad student to burst out sobbing in his office. “Nooooo, Remy. Just no. Just stop it.” 

“I failed--”

“You didn’t.”

“I did--”

He puts a hand up in front of her face. “Just shut up for a second.” She clicks her mouth shut not without one last snot-sucking sniffle. “Do you know why I picked you?” he asks. She shakes her head. “It wasn’t because of your GPA or your honours and accolades or that you were a big giant nerd--”

“I’m not a nerd,” she scowls.

Crowley points a finger at her and then shushes--shushes!--her. “It wasn’t because you were a nerd -- which you are! -- but because of your essay. Do you remember what you wrote in your essay?”

Remy shakes her head. She can’t remember what she ate for breakfast or if she even ate at all. “You said you thought you weren’t allowed to have TAs after ‘the last one.’” 

“I lied,” he says, matter of fact. “I didn’t want another student after the last one, but _you._ You asked questions. You asked more questions than anyone else. Most applicants write these big long paragraphs with words they pulled from a thesaurus to sell themselves, to tell us how smart and accomplished they are. But you, Remy, you just wanted to know more.”

She swallows and wipes at her face again, embarrassed as her voice cracks. “Well, I haven’t answered anything.”

“Haven’t you?”

“I fucked up my research. The alkaloids didn’t separate correctly. I don’t know if I didn’t use the right solution or if I let it sit too long or I -- I don’t know. It’s just more bloody questions.” She looks up and Crowley and hiccups.

He smiles, thin lips pressed together in a tight line, the barest curve upwards. He looks pleased, happy even, about her failing her thesis. “All right,” he says, slow and thoughtful. “What would you change?”

“I - I don’t know.” Crowley lifts an eyebrow, and her breath catches again as another swell of tears tries to force its way out of her. “I would… I would have to modify the extraction solution and create -- um -- a series of trials adjusting variables throughout the process.” 

“Go on.”

“Um, I could measure the effectiveness of different drying techniques such as air drying or using a dehydrator or maybe controlling for humidity and temperature.” She takes a breath and looks down at the corner of the desk. It’s easier than staring back at the impenetrable gaze of her advisor. “Or I could adjust the growth process. Do I get better results depending on the maturity of the plant? And I could measure different alcohol solutions to see which one is most efficient at extracting alkaloids from the final plant powder.” 

She looks up and something eases inside of her. Crowley smiles then, fully, the lines of his face softening. “And what would your new hypothesis be?”

“Well, I’d maybe start with the drying process. I’d… I’d hypothesise that using a dehydrator is more effective in persevering the plant’s compounds due to being able to control temperature and humidity versus air drying. I mean, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. There are _too many_ hypotheses.” 

“Good.” 

“But it doesn’t matter. I mean, my thesis is ruined and I can’t start the research process over again. There’s not enough time now to start over, and it’s so small. It’s just so far away from what I wanted to answer.” 

Crowley nods in agreement but shrugs. “True, but now you have one hell of a discussion to write. Isn’t that how the scientific method goes? You ask a question. You set out to prove it out and end up with more questions. It’s a diagram of a circle for a reason. And,” he says, his face lighting up, “I think it’s brilliant. You just paved the way for another researcher to continue investigating the medicinal properties of _Atropa belladonna_.”

Remy doesn’t say that she wanted to be one to do it. It feels petulant to think about it even if it’s true. 

He must read it in the expression because he leans forward just enough to feel uncomfortable, hovering at the border of her personal space. This close she can see through his glasses to his snake-like eyes and has to bite back the _I knew it!_ trying to bubble out of her. “Or,” he says, drawing it out. “It’s only mid-November. There’s plenty of time yet to apply for a PhD program to continue your line of research.” 

A heaviness comes over her, and the office tunnels around her until it’s just her staring at Crowley through the dark lens of his glasses. He looks at her for a long time, almost swaying as he does so, and she feels herself breathing along with him like she’s hypnotised. 

Then he reaches out and plants a heavy hand on her shoulder, still smiling, and the room comes into focus like a rubber band snapping back into place. “It’s just a thought. You have plenty of time to decide.” 

She nods and takes another shaky breath, embarrassed about losing it in front of her advisor. Then she remembers the Visitor has been in the room the entire time. She looks up at them and is surprised by their expression. They look thoughtful, face open and curious about the whole exchange. She feels examined. However, their defensiveness is gone, replaced with curiosity and maybe even interest. 

What had Crowley said? Knowledge doesn’t make people good. It makes them passionate. She sees a little bit of that in the Visitor’s face. She nods at them and then at Crowley. “I’ll think about it, I guess.”

“That’s all I ask.” He shoves his hands in the very snug, small pockets in the front of his jeans and turns to look at the Visitor. He lifts his chin, defiant even in the sprawl of his body, his open jacket, untucked shirt and errant curl of hair rebelling against all the product. “Making a mistake isn’t a failure. It’s learning. I once made a mistake a long, long time ago, before time itself. For aeons, I thought what came after was a punishment, but I turned it into opportunity, and I did that,” he says, pointing at Remy, “by learning from them.”

“I see,” the Visitor says, and Remy exhales the breath she’d been holding in relief. They say it with a slow, thoughtful cadence, nodding their head. Maybe, just maybe, they do see. 

She leaves Crowley’s office in a daze. If her life were a movie, she’d be in the montage by now, a blurry shift of scenes as she leaves campus and stops at the chemist’s and then somehow finds herself outside of Joe’s door with a bottle of Jameson and a pair of clippers. 

The first thing she says when he opens the door is, “I think I’m going to be okay.”

Joe looks at her without missing a beat -- like he’s been following the plot this entire time -- and says, “Yeah, I know.”

She waves the clippers in front of his face, and hiccups, still blotchy and tear-stained. “Ready?”

He opens the door and gestures for her to come in. As dramatic as it sounds, it feels like the first day of the rest of her life.

On Monday, she wakes up hungover and panicked, filled with excitement and remorse as she stares at her buzzed head, the slightest bit of stubble covering her scalp. She doesn’t know if the nausea is from all the alcohol she drank for courage over the weekend or the sheer terror she feels when she realises she _shaved her head._ She had been relieved that her head wasn’t so weird-shaped after all (unlike Joe who, once Remy was done with the buzzer in one hand and the bottle of Jameson in the other, sighed in resignation that the back of his head was, as suspected, totally flat). This morning, however, it just makes her more gaunt and tired-looking. She spends thirty minutes scrambling for hats, trying on caps and beanies and even a pair of headphones to hide the fact that her hair is gone, but finally gives up when she sees she’s late for lecture.

“Fuck it,” she mutters and stomps out the door. 

Then she steps outside and remembers it’s November and frigid and doubles back for the first hat she can find.

She enters the grad room with trepidation. She refrained from messaging anyone over the weekend, no snaps or Facebook or singing Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” on TikTok (Joe’s idea; she declined). When she had staggered back home to her little flat and its ill-lit bathroom, she spent an hour running her fingers over the remaining fuzz, tilting her head this way and that like she was learning about a brand new person. Now, facing real people feels like marching to the stocks, about to get pelted with ridicule instead of rotten vegetables, and at this point she doesn’t know what would be worse. 

The doorway is open and she stops at the threshold. The room seems the same, but she feels different, brand new and raw, like she’d spent the weekend clawing her way out screaming from one life to the next. And then Andrew sees her, looks up wide-eyed and says, “ _Awesome_.” 

A laugh escapes her in disbelief. Effie claps her hands over her mouth and then jumps up to greet her. “Whoa!” she says, and her face blooms with a sort of delight that bleeds out of her and fills Remy right up with joy. “Can I touch it?”

“Yeah, ‘course.” 

“God, that’s brilliant. I could never do something so brave. And you look so cool! Like Kristen Stewart or Miley Cyrus!” Remy exhales in relief. 

Later, she passes Crowley’s office and hears his computer speakers blaring _Doing All Right_ as she walks past. She’s fluent in the language of Crowley these days and takes it as a sign of approval from the higher authority that is her advisor. She runs a hand over her head and smiles.

And in the end, the Visitor disappears, and Dr Fell relaxes, and the history nerds breathe a sigh of relief. Hannah reports that on occasion she’ll hear Dr Fell on the phone buzzing with excitement. “Oh, _Zaniel_ ,” he might say with all the delight and fervour he saves for the last bite of dragon roll sitting on his desk. “You must go to the Louvre next. It has one of the largest collections of history on the planet, and there’s a little bistro nearby that is marvellous.” The little jaunt to his step returns, and when he swings ‘round to the Biology building, Crowley smiles at the sight of him.

The end of the semester zips by, and all botany grads put their heads down and hunch their shoulders. Remy throws out her samples but only after taking copious photographs and documenting the consistency and separation of the plant in its alcohol solution. It’s not ruined, she reminds herself. It’s just not what she expected.

The four of them splinter off from each other, each eking out their own space where they can grade and study and write their results. Remy avoids the library in the Biology building for its bright lights and nouveau-chic furniture that’s too stiff to sit on. Instead, she stows away in the Humanities building library where it’s darker and a little dustier, tucking herself into a beanbag in the corner of a random section of books focusing on Medieval religious studies. She opens her Google Doc with her thesis and skims over the copious amounts of notes Crowley’s left on her last edits. They comprise mostly of emojis and the occasional WHAT? She rolls her eyes but then reads over her sentences again carefully before hitting the backspace key.

After what may be ten minutes or an hour, she’s interrupted when someone turns into her aisle. “Oh! Well, hi,” Dr Fell says. She looks up in surprise, though she shouldn’t be. It’s his department, after all. She’s just so rarely interacted with him without anyone else around. There’s a pause as he racks his brain, one finger in the air hovering by his chin until he finds what he’s looking for and snaps his fingers. “Remy.”

“Yep,” she says. “That’s me.” 

“Lovely hairdo,” he says. “Crowley went through a phase like that once.”

“Really?”

“Mmmhmm,” Dr Fell says, but does not expand on the matter. She can’t tell if he approved or not but supposes it doesn’t matter. “Don’t mind me, my dear. I’m just looking for something.” He gestures at the shelves.

“May I ask you a question?” She watches him for a moment. After everything they’ve discovered and have yet to learn about their pair of supernatural professors, she still doesn’t _get it_. Why are they here of all places? And how did two such opposites even find each other?

He smiles. It’s warm and open and straightforward. “Of course.” 

She looks at him, backlit by the fluorescent lights, the crown of his hair a white fluffy circle. Then he motions for her to scoot over as he joins her on the floor against the opposite stacks. He’s awkward on the floor in his collared shirt and tartan bow tie, the hem of his pleated pants lifting as he bends his knees. In the shadow, he loses some of his luminosity, less untouchable, more kind. He fiddles with his boutonniere. It’s a small sprig of white flowers with six distinct petals sprouting from its yellow centre. _The Star of Bethlehem_ , she thinks. _Reconciliation._

“What would you be doing now if you never married Crowley?”

“Ah,” he says. For the briefest moment, something dark flickers over his face as he swallows. “What did Crowley have to say on the matter?”

“He said he’d still be doing the same thing now. Something something about spreading dissent and knowledge.” 

He smiles here, but it’s a private smile more than anything. “Indeed. My dearest husband has always had the envious ability to transform and adapt. It’s in his nature, you see. He’s all about forward motion.” 

“And for you?”

“For some of us, it’s not as natural. I had to be taught. I had to learn. Fortunately, I had a very patient teacher, as do you.” He inhales and pauses, teetering on a thought. “I’m still learning to move forward, to let go of certain… beliefs, but I have learned that it’s a process. It takes time. And if I have anything, it’s time.” 

Remy tucks one knee up to her chin. “What do you think? Should I apply for a doctoral program?” 

“I believe you should do whatever your heart tells you.” It’s hokey. Remy wants to roll her eyes, but at the same time, she knows Dr Fell really believes that. There’s a particular conviction to his voice, firm, and it fills her a little bit with the same faith. “And perhaps,” he adds, “I should do the same.” 

“It’s good advice,” she agrees.

Then he leans forward and looks her in the eyes and taps the side of his nose. For a moment, his eyes seem brighter, bluer, like the Colorado sky over the Rocky Mountains. “May you be blessed with the strength and courage to follow your heart, wherever it may lead you, for I know it will lead you true.” 

Remy feels full at that moment, her chest expanding so much so that she can’t catch a breath of air. Emotion wells up within her, and she feels like she might cry, a good cathartic kind of cry like a purge of all the doubt and hesitance inside of her. He smiles, rises, and dusts off his pants. Before she can say thank you, he dips around the corner and disappears. 

“But you didn’t even get what you were looking for!” she shouts after him. She’s met with silence. Taking a breath, she clicks on an open tab she’d been saving for the last two weeks, a list of universities she’s been sorting through with links to all of their applications. 

“I’m okay,” she says out loud. It’s a day-by-day process, and she still doesn’t have all the answers. She knows now with more answers come more questions, but it settles over her like a blanket. There’s certainty even in uncertainty. She runs her hands over her head, the ends of her hair softening as it grows in. She nods to herself and returns to clicking through tabs on her laptop. Yeah. She’s doing all right. 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Thanks to Savvycalifragilistic and raiining the beta!
> 
> 2\. I am aware, yes, that it took me over a year to write the next installment. Thank you everyone for your patience. I am still floored by the kudos and comments that come in daily! <3
> 
> 3\. Everything I know about alkaloid extraction -- and belladonna for that matter -- comes from Google. I have a clinical masters of science in Communication Sciences and Disorders which is a very different breed than Botany. That said, really, this part is a love letter to my advisors in grad school who helped me through even when things got shitty. 
> 
> 4\. Completing my PhD has been a lifelong dream and nightmare.
> 
> 5\. The title for this comes from Queen’s ”Doing All Right”. One must appreciate that Crowley has a theme song for every moment in Remy’s life.
> 
> You can follow me on tumblr @nieded. <3
> 
> ETA: Also thank you to everyone who continues to read this and then tells me how traumatized you were after school. I don't mean to bring up bad times, so thanks for sticking with me. And for the few who told me this _inspired you to go to grad school_ , I hope you're loving it much as I did, hating it less, and are pushing through to the winter holidays, especially during these crazy times!


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